Wednesday, 9 June 2010

The Lost Larsson

The good news for Stieg Larsson addicts: two unpublished manuscripts have been unearthed in his native Sweden. The bad news: they have nothing to do with the Millennium trilogy and, in any case, fans might never be able to read them.

The National Library of Sweden last night revealed that it was in possession of two science fiction stories, sent by a 17-year-old Larsson to a magazine in the 1970s in an attempt at making his publishing debut.

Unlike the labyrinthine Millennium novels, the teenage works, The Crystal Balls and The Flies, are not thought to run to more than five pages each.

In a letter accompanying his speculative submission to the Jules Verne magazine, Larsson described himself as "a 17-year-old guy from Umea in the north of Sweden with dreams of becoming an author and journalist".

The magazine abruptly crushed those dreams, rejecting his first tentative literary efforts.Decades later, in 2007, the stories were donated to the library as part of a wider archive provided by the Jules Verne magazine. And there they gathered dust until yesterday, and the library's public revelation.

The big question now is whether these teenage stories will ever be seen by Larsson's ravenous public.